What Does This Tune Say?

In 1873, Phoebe Knapp sat at her piano and played a new melody for her friend Fanny Crosby. When she finished, she asked, "What does this tune say?" Without hesitation, Crosby replied, "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh what a foretaste of glory divine!"

Fanny Crosby had been blind since she was six weeks old, when a man posing as a doctor applied a treatment that destroyed her sight permanently. She never saw a sunset, never read a printed page, never looked into the face of a friend. Yet over the course of her ninety-four years, she wrote more than eight thousand hymns — songs so vivid you would swear the author had seen heaven with her own eyes.

When asked if she resented her blindness, Crosby said something remarkable: "If I had been given a choice at birth, I would have chosen to be blind, for when I get to heaven, the first face I will see will be the face of my Savior."

That is faith — not the absence of hardship, but the presence of a trust so deep it reframes everything. Crosby could not see the world, but she could see the faithfulness of the Almighty more clearly than most of us with perfect vision.

Faith does not require perfect circumstances. It requires a God worthy of our trust. And as Fanny Crosby spent ninety-four years proving, He is.